Last Wednesday, the Taoiseach said his Government was committed to providing subsidised antigen testing and, yesterday, the Minister for Health said he is ditching plans to subsidise antigen testing because the market has solved the problem for the Government. South Africa has done the world a favour by identifying the Omicron variant, and the way we repay them is that the European Union, with the support of the Taoiseach's Government, has consistently refused the calls from South Africa and many other nations, almost the entire global scientific community and many non-governmental organisations for the lifting of the intellectual property restrictions on Covid vaccines so that countries such as South Africa and other poorer countries can get the right to produce vaccines themselves, which they have been screaming for.
Key terms by TF-IDF across 2,380 words from 21 speakers. The summary quotes the highest-scoring sentences verbatim — nothing is paraphrased.
Tellers: Tá, Deputies Jack Chambers and Brendan Griffin; Níl, Deputies Pádraig Mac Lochlainn and Michael Collins.
Party shown is the one each member held on 2021-11-30, frozen by a dated join — not their party today. The Oireachtas API publishes no date of birth and returns an empty gender field for every member in this period, so no age or gender breakdown is shown.